Prince Caspian

Shirt Study

Caspian wears this ornately detailed shirt under his brigandine...
for most of the film, it seems!

Construction

It seems to be fine shirtweight linen in a natural
white color. It's also possible it's a linen/cotton blend. The
shirt is mid-thigh length, a bit longer than his brigandine.

The pattern piece count is at nine currently: one front
piece, one back piece, one each for the shoulder pieces, one each
for the sleeve, and one each for the cuffs, and one for the collar.
Not counting any lining or facings.

The extra piece just at the top of the shoulder bridges
the front of the shirt to the back, and the collar to the top
of the armscye. This
page describes a very similar shoulder piece: "The shoulder
pieces are strips that run along the top of shoulder from the
collar to the sleeve seam. They protect the shoulder from abrasion
and deformation... ."

We have a glimpse of the back of Miraz's shirt in this
image, which, from the matching shoulder piece and dropped
armscye, seemed to indicate that it's very similar to Caspian's.
However, we now have a shot of the back in this
image. No hint of gathering into the neckline, like Miraz,
but we can tell that's it's embroidered around the back of the
neck in a semi-circle, possibly mimicking the front "rays"
that surrounds the front neckline.

Neck and Embroidery

The keyhole neckline is secured with three gold buttons, probably
with small loops. There's a black and white twisted piping all
the way around the mandarin collar and neck.

The embroidery seems to echo the compass rose motif of the Telmarines,
with a floral Art Nouveau twist. Long arms of embroidery radiate
out from the neck symmetrically on either side of the keyhole,
alternating different lengths with slightly altering designs,
and going all the way up onto the shoulder piece, and probably
around the back of the neck. The embroidery is mostly in golden
thread, with some small floral buds in slate blue and light blue.

There's also embroidery on the end of the mandarin collar itself
(observe the motif we
can see here), and small gold curls to the sides of the keyhole.
The large sunburst directly below the end of the keyhole particularly
resembles a compass rose.

Sleeves and Embroidery

The shoulder is dropped. The sleeves look to be cartridge-pleated
at the top and to the back of the square armscye. Cartridge pleating
was a technique popular in the 15th and 16th centuries particularly;
google
for instructions. You can still see one of the the running
stitches (left in for structure?) just near the armscye in this
image.

The outside of the sleeve, roughly just above the elbow, has
a tier of two long rows of smocking in a honeycomb stitch, with
two shorter rows about half the length of the other two centered
below, and then two more even shorter rows—you can see these
last lower rows at the edge of the cloak in this
image. That makes six rows all together. There are better
images in the movie storybook that shows the full tier of smocking.
The smocking picks up many of the pleats hanging from the armscye.

The sleeve is not only full, but also several inches extra long,
so it balloons out from where it's cartridge pleated into the
cuff. The cuff looks to be 3-4 inches long. In this
image, we can see that the edges of the cuff are rounded,
and it looks like it buttons at the thumb side of the wrist. We
can see an obvious gap between the sides of the cuff, though,
so it's likely that it's a looped button.

There are motifs of gold embroidery just above the armscye at
the end of the shoulder piece, and above the smocking. It looks
like the cuffs got away without being embroidered though!